Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott stated Wednesday that the latest underwater exploration to look for the missing Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 had a "reasonable chance" of discovering the plane, and searchers are not easy to give up.
On March 8, Flight MH370 mysteriously vanished en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur. No trace of the aircraft or any of its 239 passengers have been seen or heard of since then.
The airplane is believed to have plummeted into the southern Indian Ocean several miles off of Australia's west coast.A substantial air and sea hunt was unsuccessful in finding any wreckage and an equally extensive underwater search provided no answer to the missing aircraft's whereabouts.
Experts are now using technical data to gain a final point of destination where the plane is most likely resting deep in the ocean's seabed; a team of divers are preparing to search the area to look for it.
"They are now going to search the entire probable impact zone which is, from memory, something like 60,000 square kilometres (23,000 square miles) of the ocean floor, off the coast of Western Australia," the prime minister announced to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
"If the plane is down there," Abbott said - and the best expert advice is that it did go into the water somewhere in this arc off the coast of Western Australia - if the plane is down there, there is a reasonable chance that we'll find it because we are using the best possible technology."
A total of six Australians were reportedly on board, while the rest came mostly from China.
In related news, an officer said Friday that the Malaysian police held a bank officer and her husband in their custody for allegedly stealing more than $30,000 from the savings accounts of four passengers aboard the missing plane.
The couple had been brought to the police Thursday for withdrawing 110,643 Malaysian ringgit, or $34,850, from the personal accounts of two Malaysian and two Chinese passengers of the lost flight.
A Pakistani man is also being tracked down for allegedly receiving a part of the amount via online transfers.
Malaysian newspaper The Star reported that the four bank accounts were from HSBC.
